I do that for my other forums right after i made them, to prevent spammers and trolls (Proboards has it set up to where guests can post) So i do that for the first week or so to hopefully deter trolls from revisitng 🙂
P.S. Im opening it up now 😀
So the first thing I noted about your community is the unique niche which I feel has both advantages and disadvanages to it; The niche of shooting is nice and will offer users who haven't at present got a place to discuss this, well, a place to discuss this 😛 A disadvantage I see to this however is the fact it's aimed in the vicinity of Texas which unless carefully promoted in the area, may restrict your number of users.
The site I feel uses imagery well to convey the theme of the site: Both your background and header images look fitting and in place, however in personal opinion I do like a plain colour option than a picture background as it is sometimes clearer to see things. In addition to this, I feel the orange lines acting as div seperators do not really match the overall theme and perhaps would be better in a theme colour of maybe even dark grey / black.
You look to have a gold thing rolling and I wish you all the success with it 🙂
Im new to the forum building world. Thank you!
If your referring to the name of the forum Texas Hunting Board, thats what kind of the "brand " of my forums.
I have another called Texanoffroads, for atv's and utv owners.
Biggest problem I see is you have too many forum sections/categories and not enough content.
To break that down, you've divided up your niche into too many sections. It's better to start with a small amount of forum sections (e.g. one section for all animals with individual topics for each one vs a whole section for each animal). This makes it easier for you to fill content in each section and helps your forum look (and actually be) more active. As individual topics become popular and get to be several pages long, split that off into its own section. For example, if your "Dove" topic in your all animals forum section gets to be very popular, has 50 pages in it, and lots of different discussions happening in a single thread, then you can create your Dove forum and have multiple topics within it to discuss in. Do this as your forum grows and you discover what your community wants to talk about rather than guessing and having a ton of sections at opening.
Similarly, it's not generally a good idea or necessary to just have a single forum in a category as you have in several areas of your board. You can likely remedy this by doing as I stated above and merging forum sections together, but you should also keep those forums you keep in 1-2 categories. You don't need to spread them out in their own categories.
Lastly on the content note, you don't have much of it. Why would someone interested in hunting/fishing/outdoors join your board over a more popular, established, well-known one? You have hardly any topics to post in. You can't just wait for new members to come and start discussions, you have to do that work. I suggest posting a lot of topics (after you clean up your layout and condense your forum sections) and also utilize posting package services (like here at FP) to get others' help in contributing content.
My final suggestion for now is your design/appearance. It's certainly appropriate for your niche as is, but you can do better than tiling an image as your background. Either commission someone to make you a custom theme/look for your board or use a more professional looking (while still staying true to your niche) theme that is available for sale or for free.
